Metric Imperative

Product Notes

On his new solo release, Metric Imperative, Don Skoog plays marimba, vibes, xylophone, drumset, congas, batá drums, and Arabic percussion on seven original works in genres ranging from concert compositional to world percussion and jazz. Yet his music meanders through byways which defy easy description. It's not exactly experimental but it's not like anything you have heard before. As Don writes in the liner notes: "People who write music walk a minefield bordered on one side by cliché and on the other by pretension, and finding the middle ground is the judgment that each must make for himself. I don't try to create fusion when I write. What you hear in these tunes are the sounds my ear told me should be there, nothing more." But what is that? Don's music explores melody and harmony, composition and improvistion, and the tone colors of instruments that go bang when you hit them, filtered through the mind of a drummer who has spent his life pursuing the sounds of the world. To listen to this music you must resist the urge to label it and just hear it for what it is, because what it isn't is a style. In Metric Imperative you'll find Atonal and Arabic, Jazz and Latin, Classical and Electronic, not in an attempt to impress but because the sounds that enter a drummer's ears are what come out through his hands. So what you'll find here is the distallation of of a musician's journey, and like all such journeys it's subjective. It speaks of him, but whether it speaks to you depends on where you are in your journey. People's reaction to music says as much about them as it does about the musician. What does this music say about you?

On his new solo release, Metric Imperative, Don Skoog plays marimba, vibes, xylophone, drumset, congas, batá drums, and Arabic percussion on seven original works in genres ranging from concert compositional to world percussion and jazz. Yet his music meanders through byways which defy easy description. It's not exactly experimental but it's not like anything you have heard before. As Don writes in the liner notes: "People who write music walk a minefield bordered on one side by cliché and on the other by pretension, and finding the middle ground is the judgment that each must make for himself. I don't try to create fusion when I write. What you hear in these tunes are the sounds my ear told me should be there, nothing more." But what is that? Don's music explores melody and harmony, composition and improvistion, and the tone colors of instruments that go bang when you hit them, filtered through the mind of a drummer who has spent his life pursuing the sounds of the world. To listen to this music you must resist the urge to label it and just hear it for what it is, because what it isn't is a style. In Metric Imperative you'll find Atonal and Arabic, Jazz and Latin, Classical and Electronic, not in an attempt to impress but because the sounds that enter a drummer's ears are what come out through his hands. So what you'll find here is the distallation of of a musician's journey, and like all such journeys it's subjective. It speaks of him, but whether it speaks to you depends on where you are in your journey. People's reaction to music says as much about them as it does about the musician. What does this music say about you?